And but two ways are offered to our will,

Toil with rare triumph, ease with safe disgrace,
The problem still for us and all of human race.

He chose, as men choose, where most danger showed, 355
Nor ever faltered 'neath the load

Of petty cares, that gall great hearts the most,
But kept right on the strenuous up-hill road,
Strong to the end, above complaint or boast:
The popular tempest on his rock-mailed coast
Wasted its wind-borne spray,

The noisy marvel of a day;

His soul sate still in its unstormed abode.

360

VIII.

Virginia gave us this imperial man

Cast in the massive mould

Of those high-statured ages old

Which into grander forms our mortal metal ran;
She gave us this unblemished gentleman :

What shall we give her back but love and praise
As in the dear old unestrangéd days

Before the inevitable wrong began?
Mother of States and undiminished men,
Thou gavest us a country, giving him,

And we owe alway what we owed thee then :

365

370

The boon thou wouldst have snatched from us agen 375
Shines as before with no abatement dim.

A great man's memory is the only thing
With influence to outlast the present whim

And bind us as when here he knit our golden ring.
All of him that was subject to the hours

Lies in thy soil and makes it part of ours:

380

Across more recent graves,

Where unresentful Nature waves
Her pennons o'er the shot-ploughed sod,
Proclaiming the sweet Truce of God,
We from this consecrated plain stretch out
Our hands as free from afterthought or doubt
As here the united North

Poured her embrownéd manhood forth

In welcome of our saviour and thy son.

Through battle we have better learned thy worth,
The long-breathed valor and undaunted will,
Which, like his own, the day's disaster done,
Could, safe in manhood, suffer and be still.
Both thine and ours the victory hardly won;
If ever with distempered voice or pen
We have misdeemed thee, here we take it back,
And for the dead of both don common black.
Be to us evermore as thou wast then,

As we forget thou hast not always been,
Mother of States and unpolluted men,

Virginia, fitly named from England's manly queen.

385

390

395

400

AGASSIZ.

[JEAN LOUIS RODOLPHE AGASSIZ was of Swiss birth, having been born in Canton Vaud, Switzerland, in 1807 (see Longfellow's pleasing poem, The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz), and had already made a name as a naturalist when he came to this country to pursue investigations in 1846. Here he was persuaded to remain, and after that identified himself with American life and learning. He was a masterly teacher, and by his personal enthusiasm and influence did more than any other man in America to

385. See note to p. 217, l. 741.

stimulate study in natural history (see Appendix). Through his influence a great institution, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, was established at Cambridge, in association with Harvard University, and he remained at the head of it until his death in 1873. His home was in Cambridge, and he endeared himself to all with whom he was associated by the unselfishness of his ambition, the generosity of his affection, and the liberality of his nature. Lowell was in Florence at the time of Agassiz's death, and sent home this poem, which was published in The Atlantic Monthly for May, 1874. Longfellow, besides in the poem mentioned above, has written of Agassiz in his sonnets, Three Friends of Mine, III., and Whittier wrote The Prayer of Agassiz. These poems are well worth comparing, as indicating characteristic strains of the three poets.]

Come

Dicesti egli ebbe ? non viv' egli ancora ?
Non fiere gli occhi suoi lo dolce lome?

Dante, Inferno, Canto X. lines 67-69.
[How

Saidst thou, he had? Is he not still alive?
Does not the sweet light strike upon his eye?

Longfellow, Translation.]

I.

1.

THE electric nerve, whose instantaneous thrill
Makes next-door gossips of the antipodes,
Confutes poor Hope's last fallacy of ease, -
The distance that divided her from ill :
Earth sentient seems again as when of old
The horny foot of Pan

5

6. Since Pan was the deity supposed to pervade all nature, the mysterious noises which issued from rocks or caves in mountainous regions were ascribed to him, and an unreasonable fear springing from sudden or unexplained causes came to be called a panic.

Stamped, and the conscious horror ran
Beneath men's feet through all her fibres cold :
Space's blue walls are mined; we feel the throe
From underground of our night-mantled foe :
The flame-winged feet

Of Trade's new Mercury, that dry-shod run
Through briny abysses dreamless of the sun,
Are mercilessly fleet,

And at a bound annihilate

Ocean's prerogative of short reprieve;
Surely ill news might wait,

And man be patient of delay to grieve.
Letters have sympathies

And tell-tale faces that reveal,

To senses finer than the

eyes,

Their errand's purport ere we break the seal;
They wind a sorrow round with circumstance
To stay its feet, nor all unwarned displace
The veil that darkened from our sidelong glance
The inexorable face:

But now Fate stuns as with a mace;

The savage of the skies, that men have caught
And some scant use of language taught,

Tells only what he must,

The steel-cold fact in one laconic thrust.

2.

So thought I, as, with vague, mechanic eyes,
I scanned the festering news we half despise
Yet scramble for no less,

12. Mercury, the messenger of the gods, and fabled to have winged sandals, was the tutelar divinity of merchants, so that in a double way the modern application to the spirit of the electric telegraph becomes fit.

And read of public scandal, private fraud,
Crime flaunting scot-free while the mob applaud,
Office made vile to bribe unworthiness,

And all the unwholesome mess

The Land of Honest Abraham serves of late
To teach the Old World how to wait,
When suddenly,

As happens if the brain, from overweight
Of blood, infect the eye,

Three tiny words grew lurid as I read,
And reeled commingling: Agassiz is dead.

As when, beneath the street's familiar jar,
An earthquake's alien omen rumbles far,

35

40

45

39. At the time when this poem was written there was a succession of terrible disclosures in America of public and private corruption; loud vaunts were made of dishonoring the national word in financial matters, and there were few who did not look almost with despair upon the condition of public affairs. The aspect was even more sharply defined to those Americans who, travelling in Europe, found themselves openly or silently regarded as representatives of a nation that seemed to be disgracing itself. Lowell's bitter words were part of the goadings of conscience which worked so sharply in America in the years immediately following. He was reproached by some for such words as this line contains, and, when he published his Three Memorial Poems, made this noble self-defence which stands in the front of that little book:

"If I let fall a word of bitter mirth

When public shames more shameful pardon won,
Some have misjudged me, and my service done,
If small, yet faithful, deemed of little worth:

Through veins that drew their life from Western earth

Two hundred years and more my blood hath run

In no polluted course from sire to son;

And thus was I predestined ere my birth

To love the soil wherewith my fibres own
Instinctive sympathies; yet love it so
As honor would, nor lightly to dethrone
Judgment, the stamp of manhood, nor forego
The son's right to a mother dearer grown

With growing knowledge and more chaste than snow."